James Warren Jones was born on May 13, 1931, in the rural community of Crete, Indiana. His father was a disabled World War I veteran. His father’s illness led to financial difficulties, which in turn resulted in intense marital problems between Jones’s parents. Jones grew up in a home which lacked plumbing and electricity. The family attempted to earn an income through farming, but again met with failure when Jones’s father’s health further deteriorated. The family often lacked adequate food and relied on financial support from their extended family. The extended family threatened to cut them off financially if his mother didn’t start to work.
Although his aunts and uncles lived close by and gave him some supervision, Jones often wandered the streets of the town, sometimes naked. Jones was cared for by the female residents of Lynn, and they frequently invited him into their houses to give him food, clothing, and other gifts. They sometimes resorted to foraging in the nearby forest and fields to supplement their diet. He was an unusual child who was obsessed with religion and death. Pastor’s wife developed a special attachment to Jones. She wanted to help him. Jones developed a desire to become a preacher as a child and he began to practice preaching in private. His mother claimed that she was disturbed when she caught him imitating the pastor of the local Apostolic Pentecostal Church and she unsuccessfully attempted to prevent him from attending the church’s services.
Jones regularly visited a casket manufacturer in Lynn and held mock funerals for roadkill that he collected. Jones reportedly killed a cat with a knife for one of these funerals. When he could not get any children to attend his funerals, he would perform the services alone. Jones claimed to have unique abilities, such as the capacity to fly. He once leaped off a building’s roof to demonstrate his abilities to others, but he fell and broke his arm. He nonetheless persisted in saying he had exceptional abilities despite the fall. At times, he would put other children into life-threatening situations and tell them he was guided by the Angel of Death.
Jones’s mother usually beat him with a leather belt in order to punish his misbehavior. He swore in public as well as his mother who swore in public and found amusement in people being offended at a woman cursing. Jones also developed an intense interest in social doctrines. One childhood friend recalled Jones shouting “Heil Hitler!” and giving the Nazi salute to German prisoners of war who were travelling through their town on their way to a detention facility. Commenting on his childhood, Jones stated:
“I was ready to kill by the end of the third grade. I mean, I was so aggressive and hostile, I was ready to kill. Nobody gave me love, any understanding. In those days a parent was supposed to go with a child to school functions. There was some kind of school performance, and everybody’s parent was there but mine. I’m standing there, alone. Always was alone.”
Jones went by the nickname ‘Jimmy’ during his youth. He also had the habit of refusing to respond to anyone who spoke to him first and only engaged in conversations when he started them. He always took Bible with him. Jones’s father belonged to the Indiana branch of the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Jones was not a racist. He had a strong aversion to racism. He didn’t play any sport, but he enjoyed training younger children. Jones’s involvement in organizing baseball leagues ended when he callously killed a dog in front of players by dropping it from a window.
He graduated from Richmond High School in December 1948 early and with honors. Jones and his mother lost the financial support of their relatives following the divorce. To support himself, Jones began working as an orderly at Richmond’s Reid Hospital in 1946. Jones was well-regarded by the senior management. Jones began dating a nurse-in-training named Marceline Mae Baldwin while he was working at Reid Hospital. Jones moved to Bloomington, Indiana in November 1948, where he attended Indiana University Bloomington with the intention of becoming a doctor, but changed his mind shortly thereafter. He began to espouse support for radical political views for the first time.
Jim Jones and Marceline Mae Baldwin married on June 12, 1949. Jones privately pressed his wife to accept atheism. He often felt the need to test Marceline’s love and loyalty, and at times he used sadistic methods to do so. After attending Indiana University for two years, the couple relocated to Indianapolis in 1951. Jones took night classes at Butler University to continue his education, finally earning a degree in secondary education in 1961.
In 1951, he launched a project to create a playground that would be open to children of all races. In early 1954 Jones was dismissed from his position in the Methodist Church, ostensibly for stealing church funds. In 1955 Jim Jones established Wings of Healing, a new church that would later be renamed Peoples Temple. Jones saw a need for publicity, and began seeking a way to popularize his ministry and recruit members. Jones began to closely associate with the Independent Assemblies of God (IAoG) which had few requirements for ordaining ministers and they were also accepting of divine healing practices. Jones quickly rose to prominence in the group and organized and hosted a healing convention to take place in 1956, in Indianapolis. Many attendees believed Jones’s performance, indicated that he possessed a supernatural gift.
According to a newspaper report, regular attendance at Peoples Temple swelled to 1,000 thanks to the publicity Branham provided to Jones and Peoples Temple. William Branham, was a healing evangelist and Pentecostal leader in the global Healing Revival. He supported Jim Jones. Jim Jones began setting up a soup kitchen and providing free groceries and clothing to people in need.
In 1960, Peoples Temple joined the Disciples of Christ denomination, whose headquarters was nearby in Indianapolis. In both 1974 and 1977 the Disciples leadership received allegations of abuse at Peoples Temple. They conducted investigations at the time, but they found no evidence of wrongdoing. Disciples of Christ found Peoples Temple to be “an exemplary Christian ministry overcoming human differences and dedicated to human services.” Jones and Peoples Temple remained part of the Disciples until the Jonestown massacre.
Jim Jones painted himself as a man who wanted to fight against racism. Jones and his wife adopted several non-white children. Jones referred to his household as a “rainbow family”, and stated: “Integration is a more personal thing with me now. It’s a question of my son’s future.” He also portrayed the Temple as a “rainbow family”. In 1954, the Joneses adopted their first child, Agnes, who was part Native American. In 1959, they adopted three Korean-American children named Lew, Stephanie, and Suzanne, and encouraged Temple members to adopt orphans from war-ravaged Korea. In June 1959, Jones and his wife had their only biological child, naming him Stephan Gandhi. In 1961, they became the first white couple in Indiana to adopt a black child, naming him Jim Jones Jr. (or James W. Jones Jr.). They adopted a white son, originally named Timothy Glen Tupper (shortened to Tim), whose birth mother was a member of the Temple. Jones fathered Jim Jon (Kimo) with Temple member Carolyn Layton.
Politicians supported him because of his fight against racism and his fight to help people in need.
This has been the only example that we know about that someone preached in the church about rejecting religions. People were cheering. This kind of ideas entice people, because as we can see here, people would give up all their rights in favor of, in this case, Jim Jones, that will take care of their lives. Economic equality and all well-known ideas are nothing more than being equally poor, equally oppressed. Jim Jones said that he was a God.
In 1961, Jones warned his congregation that he had received visions of a nuclear attack that would devastate Indianapolis. His wife confided to her friends that he was becoming increasingly paranoid and fearful. Jim Jones went to South America and demanded the Peoples Temple send all its revenue to him in South America to support his efforts and the church went into debt to support his mission. For a short time, he was a history and government teacher in California, and he used his position to recruit people for Peoples Temple. Jones began using illicit drugs after moving to California, which further heightened his paranoia.
Jones frequently warned his followers of an imminent apocalyptic nuclear race war. He claimed that Nazis and white supremacists would put people of color into concentration camps. Jones said he was a messiah sent to save people.
Historians are divided over whether Jones actually believed his own teachings, or was just using them to manipulate people. In a 1976 interview, Jones claimed to be an agnostic and/or an atheist.
Jones established a Planning Commission made up of his lieutenants to direct the Peoples Temples’ communal lifestyle. Jones, through the Planning Commission, began controlling all aspects of the lives of his followers. Members who joined Peoples Temple turned over all their assets to the church in exchange for free room and board. Members who worked outside of the Temple turned over their income to be used for the benefit of the community. Jones directed groups of his followers to work on various projects for additional income and set up an agricultural operation in Redwood Valley to grow food. Large community outreach projects were organized, and Temple members were bussed to perform work and community service across the region. They carried out discipline against members who were not fulfilling Jones’s vision or following the rules. It extended to their sex lives and who could be married. Some members were coerced to get abortions. Jones began to require sexual favors from the women of the church, and raped several male members of his congregation. Members who rebelled against Jones’s control were punished with reduced food rations, harsher work schedules, public ridicule and humiliations, and sometimes with physical violence. As the Temple’s membership grew, Jones created an armed security group to ensure order among his followers and to guarantee his own personal safety.
Jones began to receive negative press beginning in October 1971 when reporters covered one of Jones’s divine healing services during a visit to his old church in Indianapolis. In 1973 they uncovered a staged healing, the abusive treatment of a woman in the church, and evidence that Jones raped a male member of his congregation. On December 13, 1973, Jones was arrested and charged with lewd conduct for allegedly masturbating in the presence of a male undercover LAPD vice officer in a movie theater restroom near Los Angeles. On December 20, 1973, the charge against Jones was dismissed, though the details of the dismissal are not clear. The court file was sealed, and the judge ordered that records of the arrest be destroyed.
In the fall of 1973, Jones and the Planning Commission devised a plan to escape from the United States in the event of a government raid, and they began to develop a longer-term plan to relocate Peoples Temple. In October, the group voted unanimously to set up an agricultural commune in Guyana. In December 1974, the first group arrived in Guyana to start operating the commune that would become known as Jonestown.
Jones left, his son, James to oversee Jonestown while he returned to the United States to continue his efforts to combat the negative press. He was largely unsuccessful and more stories of abuse in Peoples Temple were leaked to the public.
Jones promoted the commune as a means to create both a “socialist paradise” and a “sanctuary” from the media scrutiny in San Francisco, where he was located before moving to South America.
Once they arrived in Jonestown, Jones prevented members from leaving the settlement. His son, James, warned Jones that the facilities could only support 200 people, but Jones believed the need to relocate was urgent and determined to move immediately. In May 1977, Jones and about 600 of his followers arrived in Jonestown; about 400 more followed in the subsequent months. People didn’t know where they were going. They watched false promotional videos. Despite the negative press prior to his departure, Jones was still well respected outside of Peoples Temple for setting up a racially integrated church which helped the disadvantaged. 68% of Jonestown residents were black. For the first several months, Temple members worked six days a week, from approximately 6:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., with an hour for lunch.
In the autumn of 1977, Timothy Stoen and other Temple defectors formed a “Concerned Relatives” group because they had family members in Jonestown who were not being permitted to return to the United States. Stoen traveled to Washington, D.C., in January 1978 to visit with State Department officials and members of Congress, and wrote a white paper detailing his grievances against Jones and the Temple and to attempt to recover his son. His efforts aroused the curiosity of California Congressman Leo Ryan, who wrote a letter on Stoen’s behalf to Guyanese Prime Minister Forbes Burnham. The Concerned Relatives began a legal battle with the Temple over the custody of Stoen’s son.
Most of Jones’s political allies broke ties after his departure, though some did not. Some tried to defend him.
In June 1978, Deborah Layton, a Peoples Temple member who escaped Jonestown six months before the massacre, provided the group with a further affidavit detailing crimes by the Temple and substandard living conditions in Jonestown. Layton’s affidavit stated that Jonestown residents were being deliberately undernourished: “There was rice for breakfast, rice water soup for lunch, and rice and beans for dinner. On Sunday, we each received an egg and a cookie. Two or three times a week we had vegetables. Some very weak and elderly members received one egg per day.” Jonestown stood on poor soil, so it was not self-sufficient and had to import large quantities of commodities such as wheat. However, Layton noted that Jones did not rely on the same diet as his followers. Instead, he consumed more substantial meals that frequently contained meat while “claiming problems with his blood sugar”. He also permitted a few chosen members of his inner circle to eat from his personal supplies, and they appeared to be in much better health than the other residents. Jones was facing increasing scrutiny in the summer of 1978 when he hired JFK assassination conspiracy theorists Mark Lane and Donald Freed to help make the case of a “grand conspiracy” against the Temple by U.S. intelligence agencies.
Jim Jones began holding drills to test their readiness. He called the drills “White Nights”. Jones would call “Alert, Alert, Alert” over the community loudspeaker to call the community together in the central pavilion. Armed guards with guns and crossbows surrounded the pavilion. Sometimes he would have his guards hide in the forest and shoot their firearms to simulate an attack. Jones’s terrified followers were only told they were participating in a drill when the event was over. One drill, in September 1977, lasted for six days. Known as the ‘Six Day Siege’, this ordeal was used thereafter by Jones as a symbol of the community’s indomitable spirit. Jones led them in prayers, chanting, and singing to ward off the impending attack. The drills served to keep the members of Jonestown fearful of venturing outside of the commune. In one 1978 White Night drill, Jones told his followers he was going to distribute poison for everyone to drink in an act of suicide. A batch of fruit punch was served to everyone in the pavilion who sat by weeping and waiting for their death. After some time passed, Jones informed his followers that it was only a drill and there was not any poison in their drink. The situation at Jonestown was deteriorating in 1978. The community was exhausted and overworked. They were hungry. The majority of the community members were minors or the elderly, and the fewer people of working age found it difficult to keep up with the workload required to support the community.
Jones convinced his followers that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was actively working to destroy their community and conditioned them to accept suicide as a means of escape. According to Teri Buford O’Shea, one of the few escapees from Jonestown, sleep deprivation was one of the most effective methods of controlling Jones’s followers. O’Shea said, “One time Jim said to me… ‘Let’s keep them poor and tired, because if they’re poor they can’t escape and if they’re tired they can’t make plans.'”
O’Shea also reported that Jones would maintain his control of Peoples Temple members using punishments such as keeping them in a coffin-shaped box several feet underground, while other members were assigned to constantly berate and reprimand them for their perceived slights against the cult. Jones’s orders were increasingly erratic. He was seen staggering and urinating in public, but this was due to prostatitis for a short time towards the end of Jonestown in late October 1978, not the entirety of Jonestown. He found it difficult to walk without assistance around this time.
In November 1978, Congressman Leo Ryan led a fact-finding mission to Jonestown to investigate allegations of human-rights abuses. His delegation included relatives of Temple members, an NBC camera crew, and reporters for several newspapers. The group arrived in the Guyanese capital of Georgetown on November 15. Jones hosted a reception for the delegation that evening at the central pavilion in Jonestown, during which Temple member Vernon Gosney passed a note meant for Ryan to NBC reporter Don Harris, requesting assistance for himself and another Temple member, Monica Bagby, in leaving the settlement. Tensions began to rise as news spread through the community that some members were attempting to leave.
Ryan’s delegation left hurriedly the afternoon of November 18 after Ryan narrowly avoided being stabbed by Temple member Don Sly. Ryan and his delegation managed to take along 15 Temple members who expressed a desire to leave. As members of Ryan’s delegation boarded two planes at the Port Kaituma airstrip, Jonestown’s Red Brigade of armed guards arrived and began shooting at them.
The gunmen killed Ryan and four others near a Guyana Airways Twin Otter aircraft. At the same time, one of the supposed defectors, Larry Layton, drew a weapon and began firing on members of the party inside the other plane, a Cessna, which included Gosney and Bagby. NBC cameraman Bob Brown was able to capture footage of the first few seconds of the shooting at the Otter, just before he himself was killed by the gunmen. The five killed at the airstrip were Ryan, Harris, Brown, San Francisco Examiner photographer Greg Robinson, and Temple member Patricia Parks.
Surviving the attack were future Congresswoman Jackie Speier, a Ryan staff member; Richard Dwyer, Deputy Chief of Mission from the U.S. Embassy in Georgetown; Bob Flick, an NBC producer; Steve Sung, an NBC sound engineer; Tim Reiterman, an Examiner reporter; Ron Javers, a Chronicle reporter; Charles Krause, a Washington Post reporter; and several defecting Temple members. They escaped into the jungle to avoid being killed.
Later the same day, November 18, 1978, Jones received word that his security guards failed to kill all of Ryan’s party. Jones concluded the escapees would soon inform the United States of the attack and they would send the military to seize Jonestown. Jones called the entire community to the central pavilion. He informed the community that Ryan was dead and it was only a matter of time before military commandos descended on their commune and killed them all. Jones recorded the entire death ritual on audio tape. One Temple member, Christine Miller, dissented toward the beginning of the tape. Cries and screams of children and adults were also easily heard on the tape recording made. The Temple had received monthly half-pound shipments of cyanide since 1976 after Jones obtained a jeweler’s license to buy the chemical, purportedly to clean gold. A drink mixture of Flavor Aid and cyanide was handed out to the members of the community to drink. Those who refused to drink were injected with cyanide via syringe. The crowd was also surrounded by armed guards, offering members the basic dilemma of death by poison or death by a guard’s hand.
Ruletta Paul and her one-year-old child were the first to consume the poison, according to escaped Temple member Odell Rhodes. The child’s mouth was filled with poison using a syringe without a needle, and Paul then injected more poison into her own mouth. According to Rhodes, after ingesting the poison, people were taken down a wooden walkway that led outside the pavilion. As parents watched their children perish from the poison, Rhodes described a scene of panic and confusion. He added that many of the assembled Temple members “walked around like they were in a trance” and that the majority “quietly waited their own turn to die.” Over time, as more Temple members perished, the guards themselves were called in to die by poison.
That night 909 died in mass murder-suicide. This resulted in the greatest single loss of American civilian life in a deliberate act until the attacks of September 11, 2001, in New York and Washington.
Those who survived slipped into the jungle just as the death ritual began. One man hid in a ditch.
Jones’s three sons, Stephan, Jim Jr., and Tim Jones, weren’t in Jonestown. During the events at Jonestown, the three brothers drove to the U.S. Embassy to alert the authorities. The Guyanese military arrived in Jonestown to find the dead. The United States military organized an airlift to bring the remains back to the United States to be buried.
Jones was found dead on the stage of the central pavilion. He was resting on a pillow near his deck chair with a gunshot wound to his head. Jones’s body was cremated and his remains were scattered in the Atlantic Ocean.
The FBI later recovered the 45-minute audio recording of the mass poisoning in progress; the recording became known as the “Death Tape”.
